Sr. Systems Architect, Web Developer, Linux Aficionado.

Month: October 2018

It’s been a long time since i’ve used the blog, over a year in fact (sorry..) however, a few months ago I started a new adventure! I changed roles, industries and companies, not to mention I went from a solidified technology stack to learning a lot of new things right out the door.

Today I am a Senior Systems Architect on the Development group for Cloud5, a Hospitality Service Provider. The team i’m on is tasked with all of the monitoring and data analytics projects around the companies new client dashboard.

It’s a lot of fun and exciting challenges. as, I came from a very puppetized world to this one where i’m designing and implementing the initial solutions used for gathering data on networks and user experiences.

My technology stack has changed a bit as well, the former place used XenServer/Proxmox clusters for VMs and Containers, which was managed by a central puppet master. Our networks were 100% Juniper so management was easy. The new place is a bit different in that i’m not managing production systems, i’m tasked with developing the new technology and delivering solutions to the operations team which is vetted and implemented per my spec (at their discretion).

The benefits of no longer being on an operations team is fantastic, i’m not on call (HOORAY!) and as long as my work is getting done in a timely manner, I can leave the office and have a proper work life balance, which is not something i’ve seen in 10 years.

Technology wise, I came in after the initial product design sessions, i’ve had wiggle room, but i’ve really tried to work with what was previously designed. My thought was, why reinvent the wheel (or design spec) if it seems like its a viable product and prior people to me put a TON of effort into figuring out solutions to problems they were having at the time. This has allowed me to work with oVirt an opensource Hypervisor created by RedHat that excels at comparing itself to vmware in that it’s KVM (libvirt) under the hood, is open source, and has the backing of a large company like RHEL. Features i’ve liked so far is that you can setup what’s called an ovirt-engine instance, and manage your oVirt nodes in clusters and datacenter segmentation/management. The Engine ends up managing the nodes through ansible and an in-house application called VDSM. I won’t get into much detail (this is for another post), but it’s a very versatile and ACTIVE project. I’ve submitted three posts to the user list and each one has been answered within a day, i’ve had prior experiences posting to user lists only to get left hanging, RHEL engineers have been quick to reply back to my questions and i’ve not had a request go unsolved, in some manner.

My latest project has been docker, I have enough experience to be dangerous with LXC/LXD, and I had always looked at docker as a solution that might have gotten too big too fast thus putting it down as a viable option (among other reasons from a pure technology viewpoint that I won’t go into). However the combination of documentation for Dockerfiles, to the usability of docker-compose, my (limited to a few days) experience has been rather positive. The amount of people using it has resulted in just as much activity on places like stackoverflow, so any issues ive come across have been quickly resolved. I’m still on the fence about docker from a technology standpoint, but as far as usability is concerned so far I’m not complaining.

I’ll try to post more often, i’ve gotten a lot of experiences that documenting in a blog might be advised. As well, i’m looking at even more interesting technology that future projects will work with, coming up down the road!